Now, if elimination of numbers will never cease to be an "absolute necessity," it simply behooves us to see to it that it shall in no way vitiate the nation's strength by draining offits best blood lines, as it actually does today in America and elsewhere. A nation that adopts a rational and selective policy of population limitation insures for itself a better chance to survive another which lets blind customs and convention do the work. Birth control in the West has not up to this moment assumed the form of a well-worked out policy People who are using or abusing it are simply victims of a newly established convention, just as abortionisrs are victims of an age-long custom.Oflate years, however, the movement has come to enlist the interest and effort of more enlightened people such as Pearl, East, and Carr-Saunders, who are trained biologists and not sentimental obstetricians or spinscer feminists, and it promises to be guided by principles backed less by a warm heart, but more by a clear head.
There is as yet no birth control movement in China. Perhaps there will never be one. A movement presupposes opposition and counter-movements.But, playing upon the suggestibiliry of the modern Chinese, in the relative absence of reticence and prudery regarding matters sexual, and, what is more important, when the intellectual classes of the country are literally hungry and thirsty after palliatives of all kinds, birth control easily establishes itself as an institution without going through even the gesture of a movement stage.This is no conjecturing. Any observant reader can see for himself. Mrs. Sanger came; there were meetings held in her honor; she spoke on the contraceptive methods, greased cotton, and so forth; there was applause: birth control carried the day. But the nexr day we heard litde about the subject, either pro or con. The third day we perchance came across books discussing most freely the various kinds of preventives. And still next day we found, as we still find, all these neady exhibited in the show windows of all respectable drug stores. Birth control has been triumphant; it has been mute but none the less glorious. It has called for no active propaganda, no movement.
A Collection of Pan Guangdan’s English Essays (English Edition)